All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Felixstowe’s marvellous Harvest House where I’ll be speaking about Wallis’s year in China this coming Saturday, in the spectacular Palm Court as part of the Felixstowe book Festival…. more details and tickets here
2025 is the centenary of art-deco, so I’m rediscovering some overlooked Hong Kong treasures in Kowloon Tong on Prince Edward Road West and Kadoorie Hill for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine – click here to read….
From the good people at Historic Shanghai – ‘Scenes from last weekend’s “City of Devils” tour, as we walked in the footsteps of Paul French’s riveting City of Devils; A Shanghai Noir (available everywhere!) So surprising how many locations are left … here’s a sample:’
Talking all things Macao old & new, as well as of course my new collection Destination Macao (Blacksmith Books), with David Marr on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live…. click here
My cover story in this weekend’s South China Morning Post magazine – the oft-overlooked art-deco treasures of Kowloon Tong (image by Jocelyn Tan)….link coming soon
The video of myself and Frances talking about Wallis’s year in China, my book, China in the 1920s, all those nasty rumours around the abdication and a bonus – Frances’s own link to the Duchess!!
Click here to watch
British military embroidered ‘sweetheart’ silk panel and black and white photographic portrait Second Battalion the Suffolk Regiment, Shanghai Force 1927, ‘Defence China 1928. The Second Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, was ordered to China from Gibraltar in late 1926. The unit became part of the Shanghai Defence Force, an international force intended to protect the International Settlement during a period of unrest in China. It was a frenetic time – Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition and the Shanghai Massacre of 1927. After their time in Shanghai, the Second Battalion was sent to India in 1929.
Englishman Lionel Jupp (1878-1951) first arrived in China in 1895 and settled in Shanghai where he worked for S Moutrie, the musical instrument manufacturers and sellers who operated all over China, Japan and South East Asia (see previous posts on Moutrie here). He served in the volunteer Second British Brigade that was organised over concerns about the Boxers in 1900.
Jupp was also a great self-promoter and willing to comment to the newspapers on just about anything – tariffs!, Japanese aggression in 1910 etc. At some point he moved north and took over the management of the Empire Theatre, Tientsin (Tianjin)* and the Pavilion Theatre in Peking (which was, I think, actually a cinema). He then left China and went to America in 1917 where he publicly announced he was joining the British Army to fight in the First World War.
*The original Empire Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1921, rebuilt and is now the Tianjin Concert Hall – see below at bottom
While in Tientsin he also took up photography and made the slightly eccentric posed photos using his Chinese household staff below…. I assume some were used to promote the theatres or for amateur theatrical as they were posed as famous British music hall characters – Dan Leno – or in slapstick style japes. Jupp was the Secretary and Treasurer of the Tientsin Amateur Dramatic Club in the early 1920s when these photos were taken. And also below what appear to be some studies of street people in Tientsin (where the photos were developed at the Kodak Shop…).
Jupp retired and left China in 1924 after nearly 30 years in China (less WW1)
The Tianjin Concert Hall, formerly the Empire Theatre (1922)